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Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

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Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#11

Post by raducu »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #8

There's a reason we all don't all raise hogs now. A lot of my family in the Philippines have pigs in their back yard. It's not a set-and-forget affair. You like cleaning up kitty litter? Times the cleanup job by about a million, with a hose, and gumboots.

It depends on how intensive the setup is.

My grandparents had about 3 pigs, 2 cows and one horse in a common animal yard, covered in large, raised river stone, and a yard within the yard just for the pigs. The pigs also had a separate stable room for sleeping (really dirty indeed) and the cows and horse would sleep together in the same stable room (even though they had available individual rooms, I guess the horse didn't like to sleep alone).

I think they cleaned the pig yard every couple of weeks; they had to clean the stables every few days and the common animal yard once per season.

It was common in older days that pigs were raised in communal mountain herds, they were semi-wild, foraging in the woods, mostly on beech nuts, but they would return in the evening at a common stable/den.

Anyway, cleaning wasn't the hardest part, imho, but bringing water and hay/food for the larger animals was, especially in bad weather.

I find it astonishing how little "foreign" food the pigs required. It was scraps from us and special nutritious weeds from vegetable gardens. In later years people started intensively feeding the pigs and they do get higher yields/less work.

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#12

Post by iakov »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #8

There's a reason we all don't all raise hogs now. A lot of my family in the Philippines have pigs in their back yard. It's not a set-and-forget affair. You like cleaning up kitty litter? Times the cleanup job by about a million, with a hose, and gumboots.

Yeah, this is a really high-maintenance animal. Besides the fact that you’d have to kill it at some point of its life for meat.

I think that a goat might be a better idea. I love goat milk products, so no killing is necessary to make keeping them worthwhile. They are also cute!

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#13

Post by steve_adams_86 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #8

There's a reason we all don't all raise hogs now. A lot of my family in the Philippines have pigs in their back yard. It's not a set-and-forget affair. You like cleaning up kitty litter? Times the cleanup job by about a million, with a hose, and gumboots.

When I grew up we raised a few pigs each year until I was 14. I don’t recall the cleaning being too demanding at all, and it was done by my siblings and I after school.

What I remember as a distinct challenge is the horrible experience of killing them and then butchering them. That was the worst “clean up”. Pigs are really wonderful animals when given the right treatment and environment. They’re very sweet, excitable, intelligent beings. They’re also maybe the hardest thing to catch when they inevitably escape their pens.

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#14

Post by raducu »

iakov wrote: post #12
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #8

There's a reason we all don't all raise hogs now. A lot of my family in the Philippines have pigs in their back yard. It's not a set-and-forget affair. You like cleaning up kitty litter? Times the cleanup job by about a million, with a hose, and gumboots.

Yeah, this is a really high-maintenance animal. Besides the fact that you’d have to kill it at some point of its life for meat. I think that a goat might be a better idea. I love goat milk products, so no killing is necessary to make keeping them worthwhile. They are also cute!

You also have to remove the male testicles if you want to eat their meat/if you have multiple males.

My grandfather used to do it for the whole village and his only reward was the testicles themselves, which I remember were quite tasty when properly grilled :)

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#15

Post by steve_adams_86 »

raducu wrote: post #11
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #8

There's a reason we all don't all raise hogs now. A lot of my family in the Philippines have pigs in their back yard. It's not a set-and-forget affair. You like cleaning up kitty litter? Times the cleanup job by about a million, with a hose, and gumboots.

It depends on how intensive the setup is. My grandparents had about 3 pigs, 2 cows and one horse in a common animal yard, covered in large, raised river stone, and a yard within the yard just for the pigs. The pigs also had a separate stable room for sleeping (really dirty indeed) and the cows and horse would sleep together in the same stable room (even though they had available individual rooms, I guess the horse di…

Ahh yes, carrying food out for pigs was always a work out. Their pen was only 50 meters or so from our house, but the buckets of scraps and feed felt like they were 200 pounds as a kid. And there were several of them. Haha, all good memories. Pigs get so excited when the food shows up.

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#16

Post by tdeck »

culi wrote: post #10
klyrs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat. A friend of mine heard that skunk cabbage, in the same family and also bearing calcium oxalate, was an indigenous staple and foolishly tried a mature leaf and ended up in the hospital. It's great that people are into learning about edible plants, but it's just as important to learn how they were prepared...

Yeah exactly. Cycads for example are a very poisonous plant. Yet there's an entire island in Japan where people use cycads for everything from flour to alcoholic beverages Maize is another good example of this. When white people took corn with them and forced parts of Africa to grow it from them, they didn't take along with them the knowledge of the complex process of nixtamalization. That's the way native peoples pr…

To be clear, corn is not toxic when untreated, unless it's infected with some fungus. Regular yellow cornmeal isn't nixtamalized and is safe to eat. It just leaves you with vitamin deficiency if you don't have another appropriate source of vitamin B3.

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#17

Post by tdeck »

culi wrote: post #9
tdeck wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that article, that's an entry point I hadn't seen before! It reminds me of this database of famine foods from Purdue University: https://www.purdue.edu/hla/sites/famine-foods/ I got into it by wandering around the SF Bay Area and looking up plants with fruits on them to see if they were edible. That was how I ended up cracking open hollyleaf cherry pits and leaching the cyanide out of them, and roasting an…

This database looks really promising, thanks for sharing! I'll definitely try to get ahold of it Our stories are not actually all that different haha. I started the same way, mostly from getting into iNaturalist. I'm in SoCal right now and the landscapers seem obsessed with planting Natal Plums everywhere. I get some weird looks by people seeing me pick these big bright red juicy fruit next to their parking lots but…

Thanks! Here are a few more links that may be of interest to those on this thread:

Account of how native people used various plants: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/65605/65605-0.txt

Simple guide to indigenous foods of California: https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/a-guide-to-some-...

Food Plants of the North American Indians (sorry for the terrible Google PDF link, it's hard to get the real link on mobile): https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Aside: the first random fruit I tried was Arbutus Unedo (strawberry tree), which is not native around here but is planted very commonly as a landscaping tree. Tastes kinda like a bland peach.

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#18

Post by lazide »

tdeck wrote: post #16
culi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah exactly. Cycads for example are a very poisonous plant. Yet there's an entire island in Japan where people use cycads for everything from flour to alcoholic beverages Maize is another good example of this. When white people took corn with them and forced parts of Africa to grow it from them, they didn't take along with them the knowledge of the complex process of nixtamalization. That's the way native peoples pr…

To be clear, corn is not toxic when untreated, unless it's infected with some fungus. Regular yellow cornmeal isn't nixtamalized and is safe to eat. It just leaves you with vitamin deficiency if you don't have another appropriate source of vitamin B3.

If that replaces your staple crop, that is indeed dangerous to eat though, or at least leaves folks with dangerous nutrient deficiencies.

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#19

Post by jmnicolas »

tdeck wrote: post #2

> The animals thrived on the swampy peninsula, gorging themselves on a root called tuckahoe that, as one historian wrote, “burns the mouth of a human being like fire.” I'm always curious about native foods so I looked this up. The plant is probably Peltandra virginica, which was supposedly eaten by indigenous people. > The plant is rich in calcium oxylate, this is toxic and if consumed makes the mouth and digestive t…

Isn't calcium oxalate the thing that gives kidney stones?

Re: Everyone used to raise hogs (2016)

#20

Post by dsego »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #13
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #8

There's a reason we all don't all raise hogs now. A lot of my family in the Philippines have pigs in their back yard. It's not a set-and-forget affair. You like cleaning up kitty litter? Times the cleanup job by about a million, with a hose, and gumboots.

When I grew up we raised a few pigs each year until I was 14. I don’t recall the cleaning being too demanding at all, and it was done by my siblings and I after school. What I remember as a distinct challenge is the horrible experience of killing them and then butchering them. That was the worst “clean up”. Pigs are really wonderful animals when given the right treatment and environment. They’re very sweet, excitable…

When I was a kid we had one that loved to roll on its back and get a tummy scratch. That one had a distinct personality. We were all very sad when it was time to butcher it. Then there are all the anecdotes every year when the pig would run away and my father or uncle would chase it with the hammer or axe to knock it out. Around here all the slaughters traditionally happened in a few days in November so the whole village would be echoing with squeals. The smells were intensive, images of intestines, scalding and scraping... It was really overwhelming for me as a child. (more context on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_slaughter#Former_Yugoslavi...)
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